No one expects to be carjacked. I certainly didn’t. Which is why I was slouched in the driver’s seat with my left hand deep in a box of Cheez-Its while I waited for the light to turn green. Kanye boomed from my speakers—his numerous controversies be damned—, rattling the closed windows and causing me to trip off the power. A smile hung on my face.

My workday was over, and it was time for some good old-fashioned rest and relaxation.

That was the plan, anyway. Rest, relaxation, and the crafty bank balance arithmetic I did every evening to ensure that I hadn’t missed any crucial bills. I had to account for the rent, minus the electric, and minus the amount that I’d set aside for my mother…which was the singular number in the entire equation that I never touched, never rounded down, and never "borrowed against" no matter how thin the rest got. I'd been doing that math since I was nineteen years old, and it was still a necessary evil five years later while sitting in a fourteen-year-old car with cheese dust on my fingers.

A tall, slim woman raced up from behind my car. I caught a glimpse of her right as she yanked on my door handle, whipping it open. “Out of the car!”

What the hell?? I’d always pictured carjackers as buff males with the finest of facial scars and demeanours seconds away from pistol-whipping your teeth out. But…this? This woman looked as though she’d stepped off a catwalk and promptly mistaken my Corolla for her own.

“This is mine now!” Her Russian accent rattled in my ears.

Nope. There was no mistaken vehicular identity here. I was actually being carjacked by a beautiful blonde Russian woman. If only I’d just locked the doors! My mother had always lectured me about neglecting to lock my car door, something that I’d always found trivial because who the fuck was going to carjack a fourteen year old Corolla?

Sorry, Mother.

“Aaah!” I shrank into myself, the sudden movement causing my box of Cheez-Its to tumble out of the car and onto the concrete below.

What a waste of a snack.

“Jesus Christ,” came another voice from somewhere outside of the car. The back right door opened, and a different woman slid inside. This one was brunette, accentless, and she, too, was missing the physique that I’d come to expect from a carjacker. She stretched out in my backseat and slammed the door. “Hurry up, and get us out of here!”

Before I could object, the Russian woman shoved me to the side, causing me to pitch headfirst into the passenger-side floorboard. My body tangled in my seatbelt and promptly contorted my lanky frame into something reminiscent of a macabre aerial arts performance. The Russian struggled to release me from the seatbelt’s unforgiving latch, but it held tight.